Part 15 (1/2)

When our discussion ended, the London chavurah chavurah formed a circle. As I prayed arm in arm with these strangers who had received me so warmly, I was embarra.s.sed to find big tears rolling down my cheeks. I had no such group myself to return to. I was feeling sorry for myself, and in a funny way, feeling sorry for G.o.d. formed a circle. As I prayed arm in arm with these strangers who had received me so warmly, I was embarra.s.sed to find big tears rolling down my cheeks. I had no such group myself to return to. I was feeling sorry for myself, and in a funny way, feeling sorry for G.o.d.

I knew that the feeling of emptiness, of lack of meaning, of absence, which I'd often encountered in my life, was connected to this lonely G.o.d Zalman had conjured up. And I realized that at some very deep level, which I had never even allowed myself to express, I had felt lonely for G.o.d myself for many years.

Perhaps at some essential level this is a difference between Jews and Buddhists. Both may experience a profound sense of emptiness in the universe: the meaningless swirl of samsara, the spilled and scattered light of our fragmented lives. For the Buddhist this emptiness is open s.p.a.ce. For the Jew it is an absence. And from there the paths diverge.

Quite appropriately, the last temple we visited that day was a synagogue. The architecture looked very familiar, too, like my old temple in Baltimore built in the fifties. There was a nice courtyard garden and the obligatory plaque with its list of donors on the outer wall. As we pa.s.sed into the prayer hall, six Jewish stars were framed overhead in the gla.s.s transom.

We were met by a short, energetic man. Ezekiel Isaac Malecar is extraordinarily proud of his temple and keeps it going as shammas shammas and and chazzan chazzan. Nathan Katz, who had arranged our visit, called him ”Judaism's flickering candle in India's capital.”

I was impressed by the variety of our hats. Tsangpo, our Tibetan travel guide, joined us, smiling broadly, glad our trip was nearly over. He wore a yellow sateen yarmulke. I wore my Indiana Jones. Marc Lieberman, sporting an orange Hindu cap from the Tibetan market, sat next to his wife, Nancy Garfield, who'd spent most of the time we were in Dharamsala in England recuperating from an asthma attack. Zalman, learning we were going to do a kiddush, ran out to get the drivers, a very sweet gesture. The handy Mr. Singh joined us and so did Ran, in a powder-blue turban.

Meanwhile, Isaac's seven-year-old daughter was being grilled by two experienced Jewish mothers.

”Do you know what shalom shalom means?” Joy asked her. The little girl with dark brown eyes smiled shyly. Then Blu, ”Do you know what means?” Joy asked her. The little girl with dark brown eyes smiled shyly. Then Blu, ”Do you know what Shabbat Shalom Shabbat Shalom means?” She nodded vigorously. means?” She nodded vigorously.

Yitz, adjusting his gla.s.ses, stood beside Isaac at the prayer stand and led a brief service. We sat on metal folding chairs. I saw Moshe Waldoks, and next to him, Ram Da.s.s, the yellow yarmulke looking pretty natural on his head. He was very carefully studying the prayer book, his finger creasing his temple.

21.

Buddha's Jews.

Ram Da.s.s remembers that moment in Delhi as a kind of epiphany. As he leafed through the Jewish prayer book in the Judah Hyam synagogue, he felt himself to be ”in a very tender state.”

He told me later, ”I was reading the prayers and feeling that they were coming out of a time and place and wording that made it very difficult to connect to the essence of Judaism.

”But I was also remembering sentimental feelings of my bar mitzvah and high holidays. I was feeling a distance from the whole process and at the same time somewhere touched very deeply in my being. That was an interesting moment in time-part of a sequence that's been going on for many years. I mean, to be a Jew and then feel alien in your own religious situation is a strange feeling. Because of the nature of Hebrew and of Judaism, the closed circle quality-you're either in or out in a certain way-the feeling I had at that moment, I was outside of it. And yet I was there, and there as a Jew. So I had that interesting feeling I've had before: I don't belong and yet I'm there-what many Jews feel who have gone into Eastern religions.”

Ram Da.s.s's mixed feelings testify to the strength of Jewish roots, no matter how attenuated. Allen Ginsberg, who defines himself strictly as a cultural Jew, can reel off the blessing over bread at the drop of a hat. Thubten Chodron and Alex Berzin maintain an ongoing correspondence-Dear Sadie, Dear Melvin-full of Jewish jokes and Yiddish words. These sc.r.a.ps and remnants of Jewishness made me wonder if JUBUs from strong Jewish backgrounds might be evolving a blend of Judaism and Buddhism.

Clearly, the whole venture to Dharamsala expressed Dr. Marc Lieberman's personal struggle to have the two traditions meet with love and respect. He had spent at least ten years as an observant Jew, in Israel and the United States, was fluent in Hebrew, and is knowledgeable about Jewish texts. When he came to Buddhism, he made an audacious decision.

”I'd shed ident.i.ties before, and there was a real superficiality to that. If anything I was learning in meditation was true, it was true at the level of integration, not disintegration.” He felt no compulsion to fragment into another ident.i.ty, or to be angry at Judaism. ”I asked myself, are you running away from being Jewish? Though there was no role model to integrate the two, I decided, it won't make sense, but I'll be Jewish and Buddhist.

”After all, when you're on your zafu zafu [meditation cus.h.i.+on], you're just meditating. So if lighting candles feels right, honor that too. Even if intellectually it's in conflict. It still feels awkward. My son asks me, 'Dad, are you Jewish or are you Buddhist?' And I answer, 'I've got Jewish roots and Buddhist wings.' I'm honoring my tribe. Jews in general have tremendous resonance with other tribes, with Indians, and blacks. So why not with our own? I'm from the Jewish tribe, but Buddhism speaks to my heart.” [meditation cus.h.i.+on], you're just meditating. So if lighting candles feels right, honor that too. Even if intellectually it's in conflict. It still feels awkward. My son asks me, 'Dad, are you Jewish or are you Buddhist?' And I answer, 'I've got Jewish roots and Buddhist wings.' I'm honoring my tribe. Jews in general have tremendous resonance with other tribes, with Indians, and blacks. So why not with our own? I'm from the Jewish tribe, but Buddhism speaks to my heart.”

On Friday evenings, Lieberman observes Shabbat; his wife, Nancy, lights candles, he says kiddush. He makes the traditional blessing of his son, and then with Mahayana expansiveness, she extends the blessing to all children everywhere. That same evening may also be spent in Buddhist meditation, or studying abidhamma, Buddhist philosophical texts. Through a private foundation, Nama Rupa, the Liebermans raise money for Tibetan monasteries in India and help Tibetan orphans. They also promote Jewish-Buddhist dialogue.

I asked Marc how he combines elements of a monastic tradition with the Jewish emphasis on family life. Lieberman sighed. ”I went to an interesting meeting three or four years ago at the Zen Center with Jews and Buddhists. A strongly identified Jew familiar with Buddhism said, 'Look, Buddhism is a universalist religion. Its central metaphor is choosing a path that is homeless and walking out in thin air. Judaism is the exact opposite. The home is the central shrine and the heart of all being. When those of us are attracted, is it to Buddhism or do we simply want to leave home?'

”In my experience, as one profoundly realizes the nature of the way things are, Buddha is someone who is awake, the rest of us are dulled by sleep. If someone is awake and sees the way things are, it's like a lining you can put into various gloves. I have a friend who lost a lover to AIDS. Nancy taught him to meditate. He finds as he goes back to the Catholic church, he can now interpret the ancient tradition-and see things as they are. Similarly, when I look at Yitz Greenberg's profound sense of Jewish integrity and social justice-so it's not just talking, but asking how can we manifest in the world what we believe in, I'm profoundly moved. I see why and how the Jewish tradition has preserved so much wisdom, because it has so much good stuff in it.”

Many would find it confusing to combine practices of two religions, but for Lieberman, this has been mostly clarifying. He finds Judaism a complicated heritage to sort out. ”I couldn't know which were the reliable voices to listen to. The glory of Judaism is that there is no single voice. There's no pope setting the key. So it's a vast musical library. People gravitate in Judaism to that which mirrors and reflects their own understanding of the world. Meir Kahane was just as Jewish as Yitz Greenberg, though Kahane was much more dominated by the demons of aggression and violence than Yitz. But they're both Jewish.

”The voice of clarity and wisdom, the voice that speaks to my heart, I'm only rediscovering now in Judaism because I have a much clearer experience of listening to my heart through meditation.

”At one point I realized Judaism was the most profound spiritual religion, because it said the stuff of spiritual life is getting a job, feeding kids, and going to sleep with bad breath: that the world is the stage of spirituality. I found it appealing that the Talmud is deeply fixated on the world as it is. At one level that's very Zen, very profound and true. At another level, Judaism seems among the most denying of all religions, because it doesn't equip people for stepping out into the ether. Judaism was never giving a path out of the world to see the world as it is.”

I have observed Lieberman moving in both worlds, Buddhist and Jewish-planning a bar mitzvah for his son and for a Buddhist monastery in San Francisco-discomfiting himself and others, especially his Jewish friends and family, who need to know the name on his label.

Joseph Goldstein offered a good perspective. ”The Buddha didn't teach Buddhism. He just taught dharma, how he understood the truth. Really, that's about love and compa.s.sion and wisdom. So as a way of relating to family-it's not necessary to take a stand on being a Buddhist. A woman came from a fundamentalist Christian family who hated that she was doing Buddhist practice. She wrote a letter to Ram Da.s.s outlining the difficulties. She ended it by saying, 'My parents hate me when I'm a Buddhist and love me when I'm a Buddha.' We don't have to become anything. If we're more accepting and loving, less judgmental-that's the way to open contacts and connections.”

Despite the difficulties and ambiguities, Marc Lieberman and some other JUBUs remain connected to their Jewishness. I found this as well in talking to David Rome, formerly the personal secretary of Chogyam Trungpa. At the time I interviewed him, in May 1992, he was living in Vajradhatu, a Tibetan Buddhist community in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Rome graduated Harvard with a Boylston Prize in cla.s.sics and served in the Peace Corps in Africa. As the heir to Schocken Books-the publishers of Kafka, Buber, and Scholem and at one time probably the world's most influential Jewish publis.h.i.+ng house-he grew up in an intellectual household. ”We were always surrounded by books, there was always a high caliber of discussion at the dinner table.” He said his father, a Lithuanian Jew who was first in his cla.s.s at Harvard, approached things ”with great intellect and great curiosity.”

Rome's family name is notarikon notarikon, or Hebrew acrostic, for Rosh Matifta, or ”Head of the Yes.h.i.+va.” ”Supposedly we're descended from the Gaon of Vilna on my father's side.” Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, the Gaon-or ”eminence”-of Vilna was an oustanding eighteenth-century Lithuanian rabbi and one of the staunchest Orthodox opponents of the Hasidic movement. So David Rome could claim very serious yichus yichus-Jewish lineage.

He was bar mitzvahed in White Plains, New York, and attended a Hebrew high school run by the Jewish Theological Seminary. But despite this rich Jewish background, he turned to Buddhism after college.

”I wasn't really looking. It just happened. Hitchhiking in Europe with an old friend from high school who had an interest in Eastern religions. He dragged me along to Samye-ling, the meditation center in Scotland that Trungpa Rinpoche had started. That was in 1971. There I experienced meditation for the first time.”

Rome found in meditation ”a sense that something was right-just very much intuition.” Powerful too was ”the quality of discipline in Buddhism,” which gave ”a way of working with yourself, a way of what Rinpoche called making friends with yourself. There was a path, which Buddhism talks about a great deal. You could actually have this commitment and work with it, work on it and progress, explore, go deeper, clarify.

”Though meditative practice survives in the Jewish tradition, the Buddhists are the world experts. Beyond that, Buddhism, being nontheistic and nondogmatic, manages to avoid a whole huge realm of problems of who's better than who, and who's got the truth and who doesn't have the truth, and all of those kind of issues. Jews on the whole do better than Christians in that regard, but there's still a fair amount of that in Judaism. And so in that sense the Buddhist sensibility is more ec.u.menical, more universal. That's precisely the appeal to Westerners. They're just not willing to go along any more with anybody who says, I am the best, I've got the answers.”

Is he still a Jew? ”I feel less and less the need or the accuracy of defining myself in any which way. I suppose I'm a Jewish Buddhist American Canadian at this point. Judaism is certainly a strong part of my ident.i.ty, as is Buddhism. My practice is as a Buddhist, not as a Jew. But it's almost as if they represent different aspects of oneself. Judaism is my family, my background, and I feel very strongly for Jewish history,” especially the Holocaust. ”Buddhism is more of the spiritual side, the practice, of how do you experience life from moment to moment, how do you work with your mind and with other people.”

David Rome felt Trungpa encouraged him to look at Judaism with respect. ”Rinpoche said to me very early on that one of his hopes was that his own students would return to their traditions. At that time-it changed later on-he saw his work very much as dealing with a basic human wisdom from the East that was not very accessible in the West. He did see bringing Westerners back to their own wisdom as part of his mission.”

Rome began working as Trungpa's personal secretary in 1974. In 1983 his mother died and he returned to New York to take over the reins at Schocken Books. So it happened that an experienced Jewish Buddhist meditator headed the most influential Jewish publis.h.i.+ng house when the late Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan's ma.n.u.script, Jewish Meditation Jewish Meditation, came across his desk.

”Bonnie Fetterman, the Judaica editor there, had the ma.n.u.script. She was a little befuddled by it. She knew Kaplan and respected him. He was a rabbi in a very Orthodox community. In fact, the series of talks that became the book were done somewhat on the sly. He met with a small group of students who were not part of his congregation.

”So she knew he was a good person and yet didn't know quite what to make of all this mystical stuff. She asked me to read it. Without necessarily presuming to completely understand it, I found that it all sounded familiar. He had obviously done some study of Eastern meditation. A lot of what he was describing had the quality of meditation, concentration, absorption practice, insight practice, and visualization. He also talked about the feminine principle, which is one of the things Bonnie didn't get and wanted to edit out. I said, 'No, you can't. That's really important.' I encouraged the publication strongly and helped with the editing. He had died, of course, abruptly and quite young, which is too bad.” It proved to be one of the most successful books Schocken published in 1984.

Schocken is known for books about Jewish mysticism, most notably Buber's Tales of the Hasidim Tales of the Hasidim and Scholem's monumental and Scholem's monumental Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. But to Rome, Kaplan's book ”was very different because an Orthodox rabbi and pract.i.tioner was saying, 'You can do this.' And that's certainly not what you get in Scholem. And in Buber you will only get a sense of inspiration and of a philosophical view or an ethical view, but not specific meditative exercises.”

Rome found this interesting and exciting. He didn't try the meditations but ”felt they corresponded with practices I had experienced in Buddhism.” He was concerned, ”especially since Rabbi Kaplan wasn't alive, what context this was happening in, what teacher principle or protection principle, what sangha sangha or community is there.” or community is there.”

By contrast, he felt that Buddhism's strong appeal to Westerners was having ”teachers who are part of a continuous lineage, genuine masters who really understand how to be a spiritual guide for somebody pursuing a contemplative path.” Also important was the sense of a ”contemplative community,” which is what he personally sought when he sold Schocken in 1987 and joined Vajradhatu in Halifax, though in the meantime, Trungpa had died. For several years Rome has served on the community's board of directors.

Yet these days David Rome finds himself with a de facto Jewish family-his wife, also a member of the sangha sangha, is Jewish by birth, and he has a daughter of thirteen. Along with other Jewish Buddhists, they get together for Pa.s.sover seders. Rome also celebrates Chanukah and other holidays. ”I have wanted to give my daughter some access to the Jewish tradition so that if she feels inspired at some point to get into that more, at least she feels there's a doorway open for her. Other than that, I don't practice, I don't observe.”

Yet he finds in Buddhism a continuity with his experience of growing up Jewish. Like Alex Berzin, he finds ”a lot of respect for intellect” and scholars.h.i.+p in both traditions. ”They've got just as much commentary and commentaries on commentaries going as the Jews do, maybe more.” But the key attraction to Buddhism was that it provides a way of putting the intellect itself into perspective.

”At the heart, there's this notion of not becoming fixated in the conceptual realm.” Buddhism teaches ”how to be in touch with the ground before thought-or nonthought. Perhaps especially as a Jew, as somebody who grew up in a strong intellectual environment, I used my intellect a lot.” In Buddhism he found something ”true and profound and necessary in terms of how to balance the intellect for it not to become distorting.”

Jews, by culture, training, and perhaps by genealogy, are highly oriented toward logic, intellect, reason. The delight in lively debate and argument, whether between two study partners in a yes.h.i.+va, or in a family argument over the kitchen table, is a marked feature of Jewish life. (I have noticed this more since living in the South where debate and vociferous public argument are viewed with fear and suspicion.) The point is that, like David Rome, I have also sometimes felt a weariness with argument. Reading the Talmud one can marvel at the brilliance of intellect, but sometimes, at a certain point, one can also feel that all of this impa.s.sioned reasoning is too much of a good thing. I had those moments in Dharamsala during the debate over the prayer for the Dalai Lama.

If it is true, as the poet Eliot remarked, that only those who had personality could understand the desire to escape from it, likewise only those who've lived in intellect can know what it means to desire to escape from it. But escape where? Shunyata Shunyata, as Trungpa taught, is not simply empty s.p.a.ce, but open s.p.a.ce. Another definition of shunyata shunyata that the Tibetans use is ”dependent arising.” Nothing arises of itself, all things are dependent one upon the other. The emphasis is not on absence or loss, but on the interrelatedness of all things. Through meditation practice, one not only comes to understand dependent arising as an idea or concept, but one experiences it. According to Buddhist pract.i.tioners, such meditation produces true wisdom. that the Tibetans use is ”dependent arising.” Nothing arises of itself, all things are dependent one upon the other. The emphasis is not on absence or loss, but on the interrelatedness of all things. Through meditation practice, one not only comes to understand dependent arising as an idea or concept, but one experiences it. According to Buddhist pract.i.tioners, such meditation produces true wisdom.

Judaism, too, has its practices for balancing the intellect, as Zalman Schachter and Jonathan Omer-Man had made clear-namely, prayer and meditation. But I could understand why even a well-educated Jew like David Rome might have found the meditation techniques of Tibetan Buddhism more immediately accessible.

I thought it was a good sign of his own sense of balance that like Marc Lieberman, David Rome is more at ease than most JUBUs about belonging to the Jewish tribe. ”I do feel special as a Jew,” he told me, though he was quick to add, ”At the same time I don't think any people are really more special than any other people.” He added, ”One of the really big challenges about what's going on in Israel, in becoming a nation among nations rather than G.o.d's people, is a danger of arrogance. It is not too much of a problem as long as you're being persecuted, but when you're not, then it's something you have to be very mindful about.”